🗓️ What's new this week
Friday is Sysadmin Appreciation Day! Shout out to all the sysadmins out there. I was a Windows IT Pro, help desk and server admin, and occasional Unix sysadmin for the first 20 years of my career. Traditional IT stuff. I still fondly remember those roles (though I didn't realize how lucky I was then).
I respect those jobs even more today because they work as hard as the rest of us, but they also have to interact with their users more directly than the average developer. Imagine every time a user of that web app you built got to interact with you face-to-face when anything went wrong with the app (even unrelated to your work) and that's just part of what it's like to be help desk, desktop support, general IT Pro, etc.
To be good, and enjoy it, you have to know the tech rather deep across an insane range of disciplines and also be DMV-level comfortable with people that are unhappy and will likely use you as a way to vent about all the problems of tech.
It's hard, full of guesswork, and sometimes a thankless job. We all have a bit of this in our jobs or history, so this is an ode to all of you who spend your days helping others.
Here's to you, tech support! From someone who did your job and lived to tell the tale, you are fantastic, and the world "needs you on that wall."
To celebrate Sysadmin Day, I'm running a course sale
This coupon SYSADMIN23 will get you the lowest price that Udemy let's me sell them at ($9.99 in the US). Click on my Courses page here to use that coupon code on my Docker Mastery, Kubernetes Mastery, Swarm Mastery, and Docker for Node.js courses. Be sure to replace/add that coupon code before checkout!
🔴 Live show: CI/CD and GitOps w/Codefresh and Argo (Ep 227)
Dan Garfield of CodeFresh joins me Thursday to talk about the growth of GitOps as a standard, growth of Argo, and more.
Thursday at 13:00 US ET (UTC-4) on YouTube.
Dan is the Co-founder and Chief Open Source Officer of Codefresh, a CI/CD platform powered by GitOps and Argo. He helped launch the GitOps Working Group and helped lead the creation of the Open GitOps principles. As an Argo Maintainer, Kubernaut, Google Developer Expert, he helps companies and individuals adopt Argo with GitOps and streamline their CI/CD.
🐳 DockerCon registration is live 🐳
It's Docker's first hybrid conference. Free registration for the virtual conference. For the IRL, I'll be there in LA. We're still working on plans for what I'm doing around (and at) the event, so stay tuned!
👀 In case you missed it
(headlines from last week's newsletter that you can skip if you already read it)
🔴 Livestream: Cloud Native DevOps (Ep 226), July 20, 2023
Today, Nirmal Mehta and I will do a 100% ask-me-anything with you! We'll be focused on your cloud native DevOps questions: containerization, orchestration, automation, infrastructure, and more. Bring your questions.
🎧 Podcast
Ep 136: Cycle.io LowOps container platform
Last week, we released a podcast where Matt and I welcomed Jake Warner back to the show to talk about LowOps. What does LowOps mean? What can Cycle offer us as an alternative to Swarm and Kubernetes?
Jake is the CEO and founder of Cycle.io. And I had him on the show a few years ago when I first heard about Cycle and I wanted to get an update on their platform offering. On this show, we generally talk about Docker and Kubernetes but I'm also interested in any container tooling that can help us deploy and manage container based applications. Cycles' platform is an alternative container orchestrator as a service. In fact, they go beyond what you would provide normally with a container orchestrator and they provide OS updates, networking, the container runtime, and the orchestrator all in a single offering as a way to reduce the complexity that we're typically faced with when we're deploying Kubernetes.
While I'm a fan of Docker swarm due to its simplicity, it still requires you to manage the OS underneath, to configure networking sometimes, and the feature releases have slowed down in recent years.
But I still have a soft spot for those solutions that are removing the grunt work of OS and update management and helping smaller teams get more work done. I think Cycle has the potential to do that for a lot of teams that aren't all in on the Kubernetes way, but still value the container abstraction as the way to deploy software to servers.
🗣️ Conference Talk Released from Civo Navigate
Civo released my talk from Feburary 2023. I'm proud of how quick this came together. For context, I had to build this while having Covid, which was while I was recovering from the Flu. I was unrehearsed, and had too many slides (some weren't even finished) but I plan to continue improving and deliver it again. I have an empty repo that I hope to fill with the links and recommendations I make in the presentation.